Green economics

Green economics loosely defines a theory of economics by which an economy is considered to be component of the ecosystem in which it resides. A holistic approach to the subject is typical, such that economic ideas are commingled with any number of other subjects, depending on the particular theorist. Proponents of feminism, postmodernism, the ecology movement, peace movement, Green movement, green anarchism and the anti-globalization movement have used the term to describe very different ideas. Accordingly, green economics has been viewed as external to mainstream economics, although there are varying degrees of diffusion and debate on what are the points of contention. It is thus preferable to refer to a loose school of "green economists" rather than any single "green economics".

The green economists share broader ecological and social concerns with capitalism itself. - and seek a new political economy entirely, with one commonly shared objective being to reform instruments of money supply, aligning inflation rates (which set the value of money itself) to ecological and social criteria to overcome "the three deficits: environment, social, and financial."

What differentiates all green from labor economists is the insistence on treating natural living systems, including the human body, as factors of production, and clearly differentiating these from any non-living factors. A common characterization is that greens distinguish "factors from actors":

However, there is also a strain of "right greens" who emphasize the role of tax, trade, and tariff laws in encouraging destructive behavior - they often characterize "dirty subsidy" or "dirty money" as the problem - and seek to change banking rather than social values.

That creative "enterprise" or individual capital must be differentiated from more general ideas or analyses of human capital or human resources, as what characterizes both evolution and intelligence is an unpredictable and creative movement towards greater energy economy, e.g. a tree spans a volume so as to most effectively convert available light to energy using its leaves.

That local measurements are almost always better than global ones, and scale of measures must match the scale of the commons being managed.

He argues that "The environmental movement in particular should put more emphasis on establishing an educational network that both formalizes its educational tasks and systemizes connections with the rest of the community. But this, of course, assumes that the environmental movement becomes more aware of, and proactive about, economic alternatives."

This bottom-up approach seems to mirror that which successfully promoted the emotionalist moral philosophy of Adam Smith and the classical economists, "that eventually caused fundamental changes in politics, culture, religion, and conceptions of human nature." A revolution not of politicians and theorists, but of gardeners, shop-keepers, and purchasers.

At the other scale extreme is the view of Goldsmith, that scientific understanding of human bodies, cognition, and Earth's ecology, constitutes "a single order" and "a single set of laws, whose generalities apply equally well to biological organisms, vernacular societies and ecosystems and to Gaia herself." Such views seem to inspire the Global Greens who believe that centralized measurements can perhaps be reformed, in line with a general ethic that emphasizes "Earth First" (the name of one influential NGO) and social and economic measurements as only secondary.

This "recognition that economy is nested within society which is nested
within ecology, and that ecological flows (e.g. watersheds, air flows,
gene flows) determine political power and bodily service relationships" is seen as pivotal by other greens who see The Enlightenment as being over, and a new movement, The Embodiment, replacing it on a cultural level.

She also claims that certain tenets of biology are incompatible with ecology: Darwinian evolution "is totally wrong. It's wrong like infectious medicine was wrong before Pasteur. It's wrong like phrenology is wrong. Every major tenet of it is wrong," she writes, in Kevin Kelly's book "Out of Control : The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World".

Green economists vary drastically in how much they question conventional biology and ethics, how reliant they are on cognitive science as a neutral point of view for their micro-economics of human purchasing. Most however are committed to "moral purchasing" regimes that generally deny the value of nation-states or corporations to diffuse responsibility for moral harms done by one's consumption and purchase habits.

A less ambitious field is environmental finance which seeks to justify biodiversity directly as a unit of stored value, e.g. a rainforest standard replace the gold standard. Some refer to this as a "biosecurity standard" or "biosafety standard" of value, but these are not yet common usage - instead a broad strategy of using conventional financial instruments to save ecology deemed unique or irreplaceable has developed, without any agreement on any one standard of biodiversity's value.

Indeed, a dramatic fact highlighted by the IPCC is that a human life in developed nations is valued 15x higher than in the developing nations - measured strictly in terms of ability to pay to prevent global climate change. Most political Greens reject such an analysis as hopelessly unsustainable given modern terrorism and asymmetric warfare, but what seems to characterize green economists as a class is a willingness to work with such outrageous commodifying assumptions.

In effect, humans cannot be treated differently from Great Apes or whales or any other keystone species, for the green analysis to have integrity. As with other species, society must then set a finite value on what it will do to avoid losing a human life. Otherwise, humans seeking survival at all costs in ever-growing numbers must ultimately overcome sustainability on all levels and cannibalize the Earth's natural capital into "resources". This constraint of "sustainability" has become important to other economists who seem unwilling or unable to deal with limits it imposes.

Robin Hahnel and Michael Albert have attempted to define a restricted, purely economic model which does not contain any mechanisms for dealing with ecological issues, but are hopeful that others may extend the model to deal with ecological issues. A debate attempting to clarify how this model, the participatory economics model, relates to the "social ecology" model, is linked below.